camp had its allotted task to fulfil in a given time and every commander
was held responsible with his person for getting that work finished, he
would naturally be unwilling to release the stronger men. No questions
would be asked by the higher authorities he knew, if a few hundred Poles
did not return. The Russian bureaucrats were either unable or did not
wish to produce a list containing the names of the Polish citizens whom
they had deported to the Soviet Union. In many parts of the Soviet
Empire, the order to release the Poles was not executed. It is impossible
to state whether this was due to the lack of organisation in the country or to
secret orders issued with the object of placing obstacles in the path of
those who sought to accomplish the release of these people, but something
more than just the difficulty of tracing all these Poles certainly did exist
where the Soviet authorities were concerned.
In his diary, Cazalet endeavoured to find some explanation for the
non-arrival of so many of those deportees :
" The Russians," he wrote, " scattered them about (between a million
and a half and two million men, women and children) in labour camps from
the most northerly point in Russia to the extreme parts of Siberia . . . Some
of them were in camps too far distant even to get the news of their release
until winter had set in. The difficulty of communicating over these vast
areas also prevented the ord
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